So Long, Loser

Yes, the headline of this post is directed at everyone’s favorite Republican. But before I am a citizen, I am a copy editor. As our own Kaiser Wilhelm shuffles off to let us deal with the fruits of his truculence, ignorance, laziness, ineptitude and rampant need for ego compensation, the world press has been echoing a phrase from the well-respected center-right news publication The Economist. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, the phrase makes no sense. Here the phrase is:

Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since World War II.

Ok, we know about the current, ongoing collapse in American reputation. But what collapse in American reputation is associated with World War II? Does The Economist mean the time that the country was caught in a men’s room outside Boulogne with that French kid and some chocolate bars? Or, to be more charitable, maybe The Economist has in mind some collapse in American repute that happened before WWII. But that makes no sense either. We had our problems — the Civil War, race — but nothing that made the rest of the world think so badly of us. We were the big young country that was up and coming and kept on being up and coming.

As far as I can tell, the only seriouspre-Bush blow to America’s standing was the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate. The morbid can debate whether that mess was worse than our current mess. But we can all agree it came after World War II.

10 Comments

Off the top of my head, I read that as the standard euro “you guys took too long to fight the nazis” thing. But after you asked the question I thought about it and I’m not sure why I think that’s a standard anyway.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not, in my understanding, incredibly unpopular in the rest of the world. It’s also worth remembering that the U.S. had just, at that point, won a war, saved Europe’s collective hash (not alone, but still), revealed and helped end one of the world’s great atrocities, and shortly thereafter launched a massive rebuidling program.

I think to suggest that the U.S. was wildly unpopular in the world at the end of WWII is — well, it stretches credulity a bit.

I don’t think the writer meant to imply that any collapse of America’s reputation occured at the end WWII; he merely was using that as the early cutoff date for the period under consideration. That is, he meant merely “the worst collapse of American reputation in the past half-century or more”.

I'm a little late to this (just started reading through entries), but: the cutoff makes sense as the timeframe of the US as the premier world power. That would be the post-WWII era, and Richard's point then follows.

The Economist's phrasing is a little awkward, but I wouldn't say it's inaccurate.